Can Punishment Generate Specific Deterrence Without Updating? Analysis of a Stated Choice Scenario

Author

Abstract

This study explores the specific deterrence generated by punishment in the context of regulatory violations with a focus on the distinction between upward revisions to future punishment parameters—likelihood and severity—and the experience of being penalized. In order to avoid the pitfalls of empirically analyzing actual choices made by regulated entities, e.g., measuring entities’ beliefs regarding the likelihood and size of future penalties, our study examines behavior associated with a stated choice scenario presented within a survey distributed to the environmental managers of facilities regulated under the US Clean Water Act. This choice of respondents strengthens the external validity of our empirical results. Based on a variety of statistical methods, our empirical results strongly and robustly reject the standard hypothesis that specific deterrence stems solely from upward revisions to punishment parameters while supporting the alternative hypothesis of experiential deterrence, whereby facilities focus on recent experiences to shape their compliance behavior. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

More about this item

Keywords

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:enreec:v:56:y:2013:i:3:p:379-397. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla) or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.